


Two Minutes

by volti



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 00:47:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volti/pseuds/volti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year wasn’t supposed to end this way, with his hands in his pockets and her fingers drawing idle patterns on her thighs, and maybe it was worse off this way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Minutes

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Yesterday Mel and I got to talking on Skype and I was suddenly hit with the urge to write JeanKasa getting locked in a garage during a New Year’s Eve party. So this happened. Modern AU. Hella.

_11:31._

_Fantastic_ , Jean thought to himself as he let out a heavy sigh and leaned back against the ratty old couch in the garage, muffled party music oozing through the cracks in the nearby door. They’d been stuck in here for an hour and twenty minutes--an hour and nineteen minutes too long, in his opinion. The year wasn’t supposed to end this way, with his hands in his pockets and her fingers drawing idle patterns on her thighs, and maybe it was worse off this way. 

Granted, it might have been more pleasant if the girl he had the honor to call a friend, still the girl of his dreams, were a little more enthusiastic about it. It might have been better if Mikasa Ackerman weren’t sitting so rigidly on a stool across from him, with her arms folded across her chest and one leg crossed over the other. Strangely, she looked pretty like that. Not that there wasn’t a time she didn’t look pretty (gorgeous, really; how could she be anything else?), but with her cheeks dusted pink from the cold and her whole body poised for some unnameable action, he couldn’t help but stare a little longer than usual.

Admittedly, it had been his fault--he just _had_ to insist on helping Mikasa get extra refreshments from the garage, and it wasn’t as though she hadn’t warned him. He’d just been a little too late, and her sudden outburst of “Wait, don’t close the--” had been cut off with a sudden, ominous _slam_.

Since then, he’d tried everything. Banging on the door, shouting in hopes that someone might hear him. “It’s no use,” Mikasa had told him as he called for help. “Levi was supposed to come over tomorrow to help me and Eren fix the lock and clean up the place.” 

Still, he’d tried, and she’d been right in the end. She hadn’t been smug about it, though (she never could be smug, was never wired that way), only tapped her toes and hummed along to Christmas music played too late as she searched for food and something to keep warm. “Hope you don’t hate my company,” she’d told him with a grim smile.

He’d laughed and taken a seat. “I could never,” he’d replied.

And now here they were, twenty-nine minutes to midnight, locked in her garage with no way out and no way to ring in the new year, except with party favors that didn’t work and a bag of tortilla chips that Mikasa didn’t really care to share (God, he’d never seen her so possessive over food before), even going so far as to open her mouth for him to feed her when he finally managed to snatch one out of the bag. (He’d been duped, absolutely duped, and he would swear it to his grave.)

Jean sighed to himself and twiddled his thumbs--he’d never been particularly good at it, but trying at it was better than sitting freezing in this room and under Mikasa’s quiet, ever-calculating stare. “How are you?” he asked in a weak attempt at conversation. _Besides wonderful_ , he almost added, but he bit his tongue and checked his watch again. _11:39._

“Cold,” Mikasa answered simply, fingers curling into the light yellow fabric of her sweater as she dipped part of her face behind her scarf. “And bored.”

“You were bored before all of this even happened,” he pointed out, recalling how she’d been spending the majority of the party on the window seat, knees tucked under her chin as she nursed a mug of tea. She’d almost looked like the party had happened to her in her own home and she couldn’t help but let it go on, like she hadn’t helped spend the past week planning it with Eren, the way they did every year. She’d looked beautiful even then, even when she tugged at the dark pleats of her high-waisted skirt or the tops of her thigh-high stockings, even as she shook her head when Sasha asked if she wanted to play a drinking game or when Eren offered her a slice of the Swiss roll Christa had made from scratch. “Not like last year. Last year you pretended one of the Goddamn vodka bottles was a microphone and started spinning around and singing Christmas songs.”

Mikasa bristled. “That was one time. I can’t believe you remember that.”

“I remember a lot of things about you,” Jean said earnestly.

She only responded with a shrug, getting up and searching the room for the seventh time--Jean had been counting to himself--for a blanket or a space heater to plug in. “We really need to clean this,” she murmured. “Levi always leaves it spotless at the beginning of the year--he always does the garage while Eren and I do the rest of the house--and then Eren messes the whole thing up again with all the projects he starts and doesn’t finish.”

“Sounds like Eren,” Jean said with a snort, fighting the urge to tell her to sit with her so he could keep her warm. Then, out of sheer boldness and the simple fact that sometimes he couldn’t shut up, he added, “Want to trade secrets?”

Mikasa’s brows furrowed as her slender, pale fingers lingered on a weathered shelf. “Huh?”

“Well…” He readjusted himself on the couch, sitting cross-legged as she stared at him, the only girl who could render him completely silent because she was so very much herself that she couldn’t be anything less than amazing, who could reject him so straightforwardly and yet so regretfully the way she had at the beginning of the year. “It’s been a while since we’ve gotten to talk like this, right? We’ve always been busy with work or school. We could just…” He shrugged. “Talk about stuff. Until someone comes to get us. I mean, what else are we gonna do?”

She took a step back from the shelf, apparently weighing the options in her head. “Okay,” she finally said, the _click-click_ of her shoes echoing off the garage walls as she walked back to her seat. “You go first.”

And so they sat there, breathing secrets, in and out, quick like lightning with little room for reaction. _I wore girl’s underwear once on a dare. I still listen to old boy bands. I cheated on that one really hard chemistry test in high school. Sometimes I do hairbrush karaoke when Eren’s not home._

“God, your secrets are so boring,” Jean laughed. “Be more exciting, will you?”

Mikasa cracked a challenging smile and raised a brow at him, and the expression alone was enough to make him fidget in his seat. “I slept with Annie on my birthday.”

Jean nearly fell off the couch.

She shrugged. “You said to be more exciting.”

“You’re fucking with me. You’re actually fucking with me.”

Mikasa was still smiling as she shook her head. “What do you think?”

“I think I need to reevaluate my entire life.”

She raised a brow. “Because I slept with a girl?”

Jean waved his hand. “Nah. Just because you let your guard down that much.”

“It went how it went,” she said dismissively, flicking one of the buttons on her skirt.

“Would you sleep with another girl?”

Mikasa shrugged and reached down for a chip. “Probably.”

“What about a guy?”

“Probably.”

“What about--”

“Jean,” Mikasa cut him off as she began to bounce one leg, “What’s your next secret?”

“I still have feelings for you,” he blurted out, the words now nothing more than visible breath between them, and he clapped his hands over his mouth. The only sound was the music from the other room and his wristwatch ticking down the last ten minutes of the year before he finally sighed and pulled his hands away. 

Mikasa was still staring at him, legs completely still, eyes slightly wider. “Go on,” she said with the slightest tremble in her voice, hands clasped together tightly.

Jean swallowed thickly, simultaneously ready and not to bare himself again, to be rejected again. “I know I told you at the beginning of the year,” he began slowly, “and I know you said no then. So I told myself, as long as we could be friends, it would be okay, right? The feelings, they’d go away eventually. You’d date somebody, or something, and maybe I’d go on with my life, and they’d just fade.” He shrugged and swallowed again. “They just… didn’t.” He sighed. “They’ll be around for a while, I guess. But I’m fine. As long as we can still be friends.”

Silence hung between them for a few minutes, which Mikasa tried to fill with the idle click of her heels against the ground, the drum of her fingernails against her seat; Jean tried not to look at her, only kept his eyes fixed on the second hand as it swept around once, twice, three times.

At four minutes to midnight, Mikasa tightly gripped the edge of her stool and quietly said, “I have another secret.” 

“Hm?” Jean looked up, face still burning--with shame or embarrassment, he wasn’t sure--and when he met eyes with Mikasa, he saw that her cheeks were red, too.

“I’ve never had a real New Year’s Kiss,” she said in a painfully-matter-of-fact tone, more to the ground than to him--the second time she’d thrown him for a loop that night. “Usually Eren gives me a kiss on the cheek. That’s about it,” she went on to explain, wrapping her arms tightly around her waist as she turned redder. “Maybe he’ll kiss someone else this year.”

“You can kiss me if you want,” Jean said before he could even begin to process it, then let his face fall into his hands. One day he’d learn to think before he spoke; today was evidently not that day. “Sorry, I--”

“I want to.”

She was tucking some hair behind her ear and readjusting her scarf when he looked up at her, and she spoke again. “I want to,” she said once more. “Because it’d be nice.”

“Do you--” he began after a moment, then trailed off. “No, never mind.”

“What?” She was looking at him expectantly, with the eyes that never let him back out of anything.

“It’s stupid--”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I read this thing once,” he spat out for the third time (God, when would he _learn_?), “where someone said they wanted to start kissing one minute before midnight and keep kissing until one minute after. So they could end this year and start next year perfectly.” In between wild gestures, he added, “I just thought it would be nice to do something like that.”

Mikasa blinked at him, and he could already feel his resolve starting to crack. “You want to kiss me for two minutes?”

“I told you it was stupid--”

“I can kiss you for two minutes,” Mikasa said, uncrossing her legs and dusting off her skirt as she got to her feet and walked toward him. “I’d kiss you for two minutes.” She nearly breathed the words against his lips as she took hold of his wrist and thumbed the face of his watch, and in that moment Jean forgot everything he’d wanted to say.

At eleven fifty-nine, a song that had nothing to do with winter was playing in the next room, and Mikasa leaned in and experimentally pressed her mouth to his, a single finger curled under his chin. Her lips were cold and slightly chapped, but he kissed her back all the same, felt the adrenaline run spidery trails to the tips of his fingers as he reached up to cup her cheek. It was something almost indescribable, everything he expected and yet not at all, but she made it that way because she simply was that way, a sweet kiss to the lips and a sour punch to the gut.

She let out a soft laugh when he pulled back and stared at her lips, stained with heat and affection and blatant eagerness. “It hasn’t been two minutes yet,” she whispered, crawling onto the couch and straddling his hips--and there was the sucker punch. “Make this fun, Jean.”

In the time it took Jean to process that he had finally, _finally_ kissed her, to wonder if he wanted anything more than that, she’d already begun to kiss him again, pressed him against the back of the couch, eased her tongue between his lips and twisted her fingers in his hair, coaxing him to play along. And in the time it took him to wonder what he was allowed to do, where he was allowed to touch (he winced as he remembered the one time she’d punched someone at work for making a lewd comment about her breasts), she pulled back and laughed. “You’re pretty boring yourself,” she said, as she made a grab for both of his hands and slowly dragged them up her body. Her eyes were as calculating as always, as though she could see his throat go dry from the touch.

“And you talk too much,” he replied, pulling her down for another kiss as he gave a tentative squeeze and braced himself for a slap; his eyes widened when he heard a soft mewl tumble from her lips and felt her body shift closer to his.

She glanced at his watch when she broke the kiss, hair mussed and sweater slightly bunched at the chest; she looked almost intoxicating, disheveled like that. “It’s a minute after midnight,” she murmured as she ran her fingers through her hair and smoothed out the wrinkles she could get her hands on. 

He hated the feeling of his heart sinking; of course it was only meant to last this long. “It is,” he agreed, hands sliding hesitantly, regretfully, down her sides until they caught on her hips. “We can go back to talking, if you want.”

“We can,” she replied thoughtfully, chewing on her lower lip for a moment. “Or we can keep kissing.”

As beautiful as she looked from a distance, he found he rather liked the squeal that escaped from her lips and the heat that stole across her cheeks when he pinned her to the couch with a grin, the half-shiver-half-moan she let out when his hands ghosted along her thighs. “Or we could do that.”

The year wasn’t supposed to end like this, with his lips on her collarbone and her legs trapping his body in, but perhaps it was better off this way.

\--

They were asleep on the couch when Levi managed to jimmy the lock and open the garage door the next morning, both of them breathing evenly and blissfully unaware, Mikasa’s arm draped over the edge of the couch and Jean’s face buried in her chest. It was the loud bang of his fist against the door that woke them both up with a start, got Mikasa’s eyes to open wide and Jean to wipe the drool from his mouth.

“Christ, have you two been in here all night?” Levi deadpanned with a sigh, making sure to leave the door open as he walked away. “Get up already. This house isn’t going to clean itself.”

Amid the distant conversation between Eren and Levi about which part of the house to clean first, Mikasa sat up slowly, her hair sticking out every which way and her shirt riding up her stomach--even then, she looked beautiful--and tugged Jean down by the shirt to murmur against his lips. “Sneak out the garage door. Pretend you’re coming over to help clean.”

“Huh?” Jean replied, still groggy and unaware that his hands were lingering on her hips.

She let out a soft laugh as she wiggled out from underneath him, pressing a kiss to his lips; it was soft and clumsy and the taste of morning breath weighed on her tongue, and it was nothing short of perfect to Jean. “The faster we clean, the faster you can take me on a date.”

Jean was sure that was the fastest he’d ever woken up.


End file.
